Haight and Ashbury is a simple cross. Hyde and Lombard, a cross with a squiggly tail. And Mission and Geneva seems to depict a falling stick figure. When extracted from their contexts, San Francisco intersections look like hieroglyphs.

Peter Gorman designed maps that depict some of San Francisco's most notorious roadways, from the maddening highway interchange at Octavia Street to the loop-de-loop of Christmas Tree Point.

Understanding the layout of a city like San Francisco is a bit like decoding an ancient civilization's pictographs.

"When you learn about the layout of a city, you learn about its history," said Gorman, a Seattle-based artist and designer. "You learn why it is the way that it is."

San Francisco is the way that it is thanks to earthquakes and fires, conflicting architects and interests. Emblems of our city's oft-nonsensical layout can be felt most viscerally when trekking up one of North Beach's steep hills or snaking down the squiggle that is Lombard Street. Then there's Market Street — a tale of two street grids, which Herb Caen famously touted as "that obtuse angle that no traffic plan can ever solve."

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Therein lies the appeal of Gorman's simplistic renderings. San Francisco's streets look like art objects when considered from above, sans buses and buildings and cars and people. One could even call our congested intersections, dare we say, beautiful.

The story behind the maps is every bit as romantic as the thought of O'Farrell Street free of traffic. Gorman spent one year cycling around the perimeter of the United States, during which the native northeasterner fell in love with the West Coast and its befuddling street grids. To make sense of it all, he drew stylized depictions of the intersections that stuck with him while peddling.

He begins each map with research to get a sense of the city's planning and some of its most reviled thoroughfares.

"I also go back to my own memory, try to recall which intersections gave me a problem," he said.

Problematic intersections hit a nerve with San Franciscans. A recent Reddit thread featuring Gorman's maps had more than 2,000 upvotes and 150 comments.

Gorman thinks the San Francisco designs resonate for a very obvious reason: "They don't show how wacky it feels when you're actually there."